Originally posted by: Rainsford
Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
Originally posted by: PC Surgeon
Originally posted by: TastesLikeChicken
The Horror! The Horror!
At the same time that Conason is looking back to a fictional past in America, Naomi Wolf--last heard from in 2000 advising Al Gore to dress in earth tones--is looking back to a real past in Europe, and seeing troubling parallels. In 4,600 overwrought words, she explained to the readers of the Guardian that there are ten steps to "Fascist America" and Bush is taking them all. He has whipped up a menace (the war on terror); created "a prison system outside the rule of law" (Guantánamo, to which public dissidents, including "clergy and journalists" will be sent "soon enough"); developed "a thug caste .??.??. groups of scary young men out to terrorize citizens" (young Republican staffers who supposedly "menaced poll workers" during the 2000 recount in Florida); set up an "internal surveillance system" (NSA scanning for phone calls to and from terrorists). An airtight case, this, and leading to just one conclusion: "Beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable .??.??. that it can happen here."
Well, this explains many things. It explains why poor Cindy Sheehan is now sitting in prison; why Bush critics like CIA retiree Valerie Plame have been ostracized by the corporate media and are wasting away in anonymity; why no critic of Bush can get a hearing, why no book complaining about him can ever get published, and why our multiplexes are filled with one pro-Bush propaganda movie after another, glorifying the Iraq war and rallying the nation behind its leader.
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, Cindy Sheehan is running for Congress; Valerie Plame is rich and famous; the young Republican "thugs" made all of one appearance seven years ago--chanting "Let us in!" when Miami-Dade County vote counters planned to move to a small inner room with no observers present; and press censorship is now so far-reaching that you can't even expose a legal, effective, and top-secret plan to trace terrorists without getting a Pulitzer Prize. "What if the publisher of a major U.S. newspaper were charged with treason or espionage?" Wolf asks breathlessly. "What if he or she got 10 years in jail?" Well, journalists have been harassed, pressed for their sources, and threatened with prison, but not by George W. Bush and his people. Back in the real world, only one prominent journalist has been jailed by the federal government in recent memory, and that was Judith Miller, imprisoned for 80-plus days for contempt by prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, the great hero of the anti-Bush forces for having indicted Vice President Cheney's chief of staff.
Looks like reality has a bad habit of putting the kibosh on that whole fascism thing.
But don't forget to quake in your boots because it could happen. :roll:
Please tell me thats not a weekly standard link. Do not tell me that Mr.PNAC/neocon central founders news reports are where you derive any sense of truth. DISGUST ICON HERE! (Anandtech fix that sh!t already!)
Ahh yes. Don't actually dispute the content. Just bash the link and weakly try to dismiss it. Surely if it's a neocon fantasy you can easily disassemble all the falsehoods it contains?
Have at it.
That seems easy enough. As usual, Naomi Wolf misses the point by a wide margin...but then again, so does the Weekly Standard. And, again as usual, Naomi Wolf manages to hit a kernel of truth in the midst of all the flash trying to sell articles ("journalism" is a business now, after all), while the Weekly Standard just provides intellectual support for people too dumb to think for themselves.
I don't think the abuses of power of the Bush government need to be exaggerated, but neither can they be dismissed. The "war on terror" (as presented by the Bush administration) IS a largely manufactured menace that has been used to, among other things, win a Presidential election, invade a nation that posed no threat, and pass a number of unnecessary new "anti-terror" laws that give more power to the President. We DO have new prison system for terrorists that operates at best skirting the rule of law, and certainly operating outside the principles that founded this country. And we do have a government that seems pretty blatant about violating laws limiting their power. I don't care how many times people say it, warrantless wiretapping of any US person is not legal...and maybe more importantly, it's not effective. Now all these things together don't exactly make us a fascist country in the model of Nazi Germany or anything, but these steps should concern anyone with more than two neurons to rub together.
But the real concern has nothing at all to do with the government, it has, ironically, more to do with the crowd that reads the Weekly Standard. President Bush and the rest of his administration might be doing some questionable things, but they are only doing those things because their supporters want those things done. And those are the really scary people, because while President Bush is pretty tame on the fascism front, a lot of his supporters sure as hell aren't.
The Weekly Standard provides the best example in their article. It's true, revealing the warrantless wiretapping program did not result in journalists getting throw in jail or tried for treason, as would certainly happen in a truly fascist country. Only, I seem to remember a lot of conservatives at the time calling for just that to happen. There were popular voices of the right seemingly around every corner absolutely livid that the press would reveal an illegal wiretapping program...and throwing reporters in jail was among the mildest consequences wished for.
And that's the real problem, it's not that President Bush or any of his administration officials (or Republicans as a whole) are fascist wolves in sheep's clothing. After all, President Bush will be out of office in about a year and the Republicans are out of power in Congress for a while. There isn't enough staying power in our government to set up a fascist government, which the founders clearly intended to be the case. But the folks who want to execute reporters for "treason" when they do their job are NOT going away, they get a vote just like the rest of us, and there are more of them than I'm really comfortable with. That's the weakness of a democracy, it can protect the people from the government, but it's much harder to protect the people from each other. Basically, I'm not concerned that President Bush might be a fascist (and for the record, I don't think he is at all), I'm concerned that the average right-winger is a fascist.
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